DoubleClick Search: the efficient “dashboard”

For some time now, we have been managing various marketing campaigns for selected customers and for our own brand with DoubleClick Search. Taking our own advertising account as a practical example, here we’ll show you the main features of DoubleClick Search and the advantages for marketers: efficient campaign management, useful A/B tests for text ads, simple integration into Bing and Yahoo! Japan and multi-platform search engine reporting.

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By deploying DoubleClick Search (DS), digital marketers can improve efficiency. Thanks to automated bidding and optimization processes, more resources can be invested in the long-term, strategic development of an ad account. The potential for success depends on the various aspects of the advertising account.

For example, large and complex accounts can benefit more from automation, as more performance data is available in these ad accounts and the algorithm learns more quickly.

International campaigns that use different search engines can be managed more efficiently thanks to the multi-platform dashboard.

Customized A/B tests with different levels of significance deliver meaningful results and can be performed in a controlled, manageable environment.

The use case: our own ad account

Clear strategies and realistic performance targets must be in place for brands to reap long-term benefits from DS. We identified two basic strategies for our own ad account: one for non-brand keywords and the other for brand keywords. To measure the performance of our DS campaign, we worked with our digital analytics experts to develop a new campaign tracking system that uses floodlight tags.

It took about six weeks for our advertising account to automatically adjust the keyword bids for the defined targets – in our case, achieving the desired average positions. For example, we wanted all keywords for application of our SEO business segment to reach an average position of 2.8. To do so, the DS algorithm collected click data and then automatically adjusted the CPCs on an ongoing basis within the set bounds of the minimum and maximum bids. It was found that the bids level off more quickly the greater the traffic in a given campaign.

A/B tests

During the same period, we used the experiment tool from DS to perform an A/B test and compared the performance of two different text ads. After 1,500 impressions, it became clear that one of the two versions achieved twice the CTR with CPCs that were 30% cheaper.

International search engines

The successful linking and control of our search campaigns with the search engines Bing and Yahoo! Japan brought significant efficiency gains. The DS dashboard offered a simple way to keep track of all AdWords campaigns on Bing and Yahoo! Japan, without the need to manually copy and import into the individual campaigns. This consolidation allows all our Google AdWords campaigns to be deployed using automatic bidding in the two international search engines Bing and Yahoo! Japan, and they achieve satisfactory visibility at low per-click prices.

Brand ads Webrepublic, Bing and Yahoo! Japan

Integrated reporting

DS not only makes search engine marketing campaigns efficient and manageable across multiple search machines, marketers can also generate reports that cover multiple search engines. The Executive Reporting feature allow marketers to define the key figures most relevant to them and analyze the data from all search engines linked to the DS.

The main advantage is that the results from the DS dashboard are measured across all search engines and can be immediately compared with each other. DS also provides various chart features and individual report views directly from the dashboard. The figures are fed in directly from Google Analytics and Floodlight, providing marketers with detailed information about the performance of their campaigns. Analysis of data across multiple search engines simplifies the strategic decision-making process across multiple platforms.

Example Reporting, Webrepublic, Bing and Yahoo! Japan

Our Data Intelligence Dashboard also features flexReports, which extract DS data from multiple search engines. This provides transparent analysis of budget trends and performance figures over the course of several months.

Our conclusion

DS has helped us to effectively manage our own advertising for paid searches. Due to the relatively low click volume in our own ad accounts, however, we are restricted in the use of some features, such as automatic bidding for increased conversion rates. Nevertheless, DS will remain an essential part of our strategic development for our own advertising account. We use selected bidding mechanisms, benefit from efficient campaign management and are constantly testing new features.

DoubleClick Search technical details

The DoubleClick Search (DS) search management platform is helping digital marketers to efficiently manage search engine marketing campaigns on multiple search engines (AdWords, Bing Ads, Yahoo! Japan and Baidu). DS allows digital marketers to create automatic bidding strategies for the entire account, thus eliminating those time-consuming and granular keyword or AdGroup-based optimizations. Unlike internal bid management tools from Google AdWords and the products from most other providers, programmatic campaigns deployed with DoubleClick Search are optimized automatically and in real time – or at least four times a day. Thanks to native integration into the DDM platform (DoubleClick Digital Marketing), DoubleClick Search is becoming an integrated dashboard with which digital marketers can centrally manage their search engine marketing campaigns. This all-encompassing approach enables comprehensive reporting and a meaningful attribution of campaign success across all search engines. Centralized campaign management is therefore highly attractive for international advertisers with complex campaign structures, since they place the desired campaign only once and then manage it globally using DoubleClick Search.